GILLIAN CLARKE.

Selected Poems

Journey

As far as I am concerned

We are driving into oblivion.

On either side there is nothing,

And beyond your driving

Shaft of light it is black.

You are a miner digging

For a future, a mineral

Relationship in the dark.

I can hear the darkness drip

From the other world where people

Might be sleeping, might be alive.

Certainly there are white

Gates with churns waiting

For morning, their creamstanding.

Once we saw an old table

Standing square on the grass verge.

Our lamps swept it clean, shook

The crumbs into the hedge and left it.

A tractor too, beside a load

Of logs, bringing from a deeper

Dark a damp whiff of the fungoid

Sterility of the conifers.

Complacently I sit, swathed

in sleepiness. A door shuts

At the end of a dark corridor.

Ahead not a cat's eye winks

To deceive us with its green

Invitation. As you hurl us

Into the black contracting

Chasm, I submit like a blind

And folded baby, being born.